How do you hold your own hand, and guide your body out of collapse?
It’s a difficult thing, to shift oneself from the murky confines of a body in shut down or collapse. Gravity feels heavier. Motivation feels illusive. Possibility feels more distant.
And yet despite this, the body strives and moves in the same way that every other body does; towards vitality, towards hopefulness, towards light.
This is the basic striving of every body, regardless of whether or not we feel it.
Regardless of whether our current state of being allows us to feel that this is true.
Every body is making movements, in whatever way is possible, towards wellness. We all want to look towards the sun and see ourselves reflected back.
So why, if we find ourselves filled with desire to embody a more active state of being, is it so hard to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and go?
Why, when we understand ourselves to be in a state of collapse is it so hard to ‘un-collapse”?
Let’s think of it this way:
Two priorities of the brain that is ‘stuck’ in a place of nervous system collapse (we could also call this conservation of energy mode) is to hibernate and to hoard.
We enter a place of collapse when the active modes of fight or flight are, for whatever reason, not an option, and our brain clicks us into ‘standby mode’, partly as a protection to shelter us from the difficulty we are facing in that moment, and partly as an effort to keep us around in this world for as long as possible with as little energy expenditure on our part as possible.
Remember, in a survival situation, collapse or shut down is a benevolent offering of the body to shelter us from the experience of hurt or harm. Our senses are turned way down so we are no longer feeling into the spaces around us, and we go, literally and metaphorically, into ‘our own little world’.
We are paying much more attention to the inside of us than the outside of us.
The challenge is, when this response becomes maladaptive (and what I mean by maladaptive is that it’s no longer an accurate response to what’s happening to us but instead is a past response that keeps making itself known in the present) it’s very challenging to pull ourselves out of, for the simple reason that the brain is telling the body:
Do not move.
Hold onto your resources it tells us, assuming that we aren’t able to fulfil our basic needs.
Don’t expend energy, it continues, assuming that it’s necessary for us to be stuck on standby.
‘Keep still, stay low, hunker down.’
A body that’s in shutdown chants these words as mantra all day long.
To come out of a place of shut down, we have to counter the requests of our body.
At first, it might appear that we are battling with ourselves, but this is not strictly true. What we are doing is using discernment. We are committing ourselves to our intellect, which in this case we need to lead the body.
Our intellect knows that to lead a body out of shutdown, we need to activate our senses. To do this, we need to move.
We know that to move too vigorously or to energetically will drive the system deeper into collapse and create an auto-immune response.
No— we need gentle, functional movement. And we need it regularly.
Our intellect knows that we aren’t going to feel like this. That it will be hard. So, we must be smart.
We need routine, a schedule.
We need ways of supporting ourselves back.
We need ways of attaching ourself to something bigger than this moment.
Know that coming out of collapse requires you be strategic.
Know that coming out of collapse will mean, in some moments, acting in opposition to what you feel.
Know that it is not an overnight gig, but in the same breath that it’s worth it and it’s possible.
As a coach with a nervous system specialism, this is one of the most challenging aspects of my work- working with someone in collapse. Asking a body that in this place to meet me half-way.
Telling a body that is in a place of inaction that you are going to have to train yourself to act.
Again, worth it, possible, doable (and I’m here if you have questions or need some help).
There are ways to both lead and be led out.
